Publikationer

The focus of this study is on the use of endearment terms and affective resources (including other address terms, as well as nonverbal calibration) in requests sequences in inter-generational interaction, expanding prior work on requests as social action. This study documents verbal and embodied practices in dinnertime talk (30 hours of video) deployed by both parents and children in order to get things done. The analyses show ways in which endearment terms were recurrently deployed in request sequences, marking both trouble and social intimacy. Moreover, the data show that endearment terms were exclusively deployed by the parents, but not by their children. The adults and children drew on different repertoires of affective resources: the children deployed an array of nonverbal and nonvocal means to display their affective stances. In addition, the parents resorted to endearment terms, nicknames, and diminutives, as lexical devices invoking intimate bonds in a context where social solidarity might be at stake. Finally, while children’s requests target an immediate action concerning food and food-related activities rooted in the here and now of the interaction, parental requests can be often analyzed as redressive actions, prompted by the child’s (troublesome) behavior.

This dissertation examines mealtime conversations between parents and children in eight Swedish and eight Italian middle class, dual-earner households, exploring the ways in which children are engaged in the cooperative construction of social order. The study is part of an international project (cf. Aronsson & Pontecorvo, 2002), coordinated with prior work in the US (cf. Ochs & Kremer-Sadlik, 2013).

Study I explores how children’s accounts work during family dinner conversations. So called proto-accounts (laments, multiple repeats, want-statements) and varied verbal accounts are analyzed in relation to age class or prior language socialization experiences.

Study II focuses on the use of endearment terms in directive sequences between parents and children. The findings show an asymmetrical distribution of endearment terms, in that only parents make use of them when interactional problems – children’s non-compliance with parental requests in particular – arise.

Study III examines the ways in which Italian parents deploy the discourse marker dai (‘come on’) in directive sequences. This is a flexible linguistic resource that is employed by parents as a cajoling token when children fail to comply with parental requests, hindering the advancement of the in-progress activity.

This thesis describes family mealtimes as parent-directed activities where sociality, morality and local understandings of the world (Ochs & Shohet, 2006) are collaboratively re-created and enacted. This confirms the crucial role of everyday family meals as rich cultural sites (Ochs & Shohet, 2006) for reasserting moral attitudes of the family: participants learn moment by moment how to be competent actors that are able to choose between alternative courses of action and that can therefore be held accountable for their actions (Bergmann, 1998: 284). From this point of view, a dinner is paradigmatic of the deep moral sense that permeates the making of a family.

In this study, we analyze the kind of actions L1 and L2 speakers of Italian perform by prefacing their responsive turns with the discourse marker be’. As a baseline, the article begins with an analysis of how native speakers of Italian use be’. We then carry out a quantitative and a qualitative analysis of the use of be’ in a number of L2 learners at different proficiency levels from three data sets of different types of interactions between students and native speakers of Italian. In the qualitative analysis, we adopt a conversation analytic perspective. The results suggest that both native speakers and L2 speakers, at an intermediate to an advanced level, perform a variety of social actions by be’-prefacing their responsive turns.

This paper analyzes the use of the Italian discourse marker ‘dai’ (English idiomatic translation : “come on”) in directive sequences between parents and children collected during family mealtime interactions. The work shows how this pragmatic device inhabits sequential contexts in which the recipient is not oriented toward the course of action to which the request refers, that is, when participants do not share the participatory framework and when resistance can be anticipated from the recipient. The paper shows the extent to which the ‘dai’ marker works as a modulator of affect (from encouragement to critique) and, at the same time, how it can open a negotiation space between parents and children as regards the management of individual responsibilities. The paper finally considers the findings in light of practices of socialization, and proposes that the marker supports a cultural preference, common in middle-class families in Western contexts, toward acknowledging the child as an agent and willful individual even in contexts in which he/she is asked to comply.

The purpose of this report is to analyze the cooperative strategies resorted to by an advanced learner of Italian L2 in a casual conversation with a native speaker, with a focus on discourse markers and other pragmatic and linguistic resources used with mitigating effects.